Heikki Saukko
(b. Finland)
Rocking Chair, ca. 1890
Cedar
Lakeside, Wisconsin
Lent by Douglas County Historical Society
These rocking chairs reflect two very different places of origin. The chair on the left (detail) is signed by Mineral Point cabinetmaker and furniture dealer Theophilus George. As is evident in his newspaper advertisements, George marketed “a great variety of Household Furniture” to upwardly mobile customers in the growing southwest Wisconsin city of Mineral Point. His extensive inventory included chairs such as this example, a popular form known as a “Boston rocker” elaborately decorated with rosewood graining, gold and red stenciling and hand-painted detailing.
The chair on the right (detail) is attributed to Heikki Saukko, a Finnish immigrant in the small northern community of Lakeside, Douglas County. During the 1880s and 1890s, immigrants from Finland settled along the south shore of Lake Superior in Wisconsin, Minnesota and Michigan, where they worked as laborers in logging camps, mines and fisheries. Lacking financial capital, they often made their household goods themselves rather than purchase them from commercial sources. The use of homemade goods, combined with isolation in ethnic enclaves in the rural north, meant that Finns in Wisconsin maintained their cultural traditions longer than other European immigrant groups. Saukko’s chair includes several traditional Finnish features, including unfinished surfaces and a six-legged form. On the other hand, the dramatic profile and the use of a single backboard that goes all the way to the floor suggest some familiarity with new developments taking place in Scandinavian furniture design around the turn of the century.